Last month, an American diplomat who had struggled through five months of Polish language training, just about long enough to get to grips with the irregular verbs, received an unsettling phone call from the state department. Drop the course, he was told. He would not need Polish in El Salvador, his new posting.
He was one of about two dozen foreign service officers who bore the full whiplash effect of a dramatic change in US diplomacy. The about-turn was announced in January by Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, who described it as ”transformational diplomacy”.
This meant far fewer American diplomats would spend their time in the cafes and drawing rooms of European capitals familiar from the Cold War era, and many more would be sent out to uncomfortable and potentially dangerous postings where the battle for hearts and minds in the ”global war on terror” was being fought.
If the old hands at Foggy Bottom (the quaintly named home of the state department) thought this was some plan far in the future, they could not have been more wrong. New marching orders were out in little more than a month.
Fifteen new positions were created at the US embassy in China, and 12 at the other rising Asian giant, India. There would be five new slots in Jakarta. In all, there would be 74 new posts, the overwhelming majority in the developing world. To help pay for it, 61 positions were being cut: 10 in Russia, seven in Germany, with two or three axed in each of Belgium, Poland, Italy, Spain, Japan and Brazil.
In the diplomatic world, it was an earthquake and what has come with it is a general acceptance that the shift in how America engages with the world was inevitable and necessary in a time when the country was at war.
Exemplifying the new American thinking, United States President George Bush this week travelled to three countries at the heart of the new strategy. First stop was Afghanistan, to reassure its nascent yet fragile government that the US would not abandon its fight against the Taliban. Then India, a new economic powerhouse, which according to some is being courted as a counterweight to the rapidly expanding ambitions of China. And finally to Pakistan, another nuclear power, whose volatile regions provide a harbour for al-Qaeda.
All three offer varying diplomatic challenges and with it different dangers. That danger was brought home on Thursday when a suicide bomber rammed his explosive-laden Toyota Corolla into the US consulate’s car in Karachi, killing an official, David Moy (51) and three others.
It is not just the US that is having to rethink its priorities. Old Europe too is repositioning, mainly in response to the rise in Islamic fundamentalism, which potentially poses a bigger problem for this continent than the US. Britain, France and Germany are also focused on China, but less as a military threat than as a commercial rival.
Michael Jay, the head of the British diplomatic service, who is on a trip to Ghana, said on Friday from Accra: ”Whilst Britain’s political, economic and commercial interests in the world are as important as ever, the global context is changing. The world is more complex, more uncertain, and foreign and domestic policy are increasingly interlinked.
”We are making sure our resources are deployed so the right people are in the right places to promote Britain’s interests around the world over the medium term. Among other things, this means shifting resources from our European to our Asian network.”
The British Foreign Office, which has 153 embassies and high commissions, 10 missions to bodies such as the United Nations, and 70 consulates put out a report in December 2004 setting out on paper for the first time its priorities: counter-terrorism; combating illegal immigration, drug-trafficking and other international crime; conflict resolution; Europe; promotion of UK economic interests; sustainable development; and UK security. That report is being reviewed and the results will be announced shortly. All ambassadors are being brought back to London at the end of this month to discuss it.
By the end of the year, nine embassies and high commissions will have been closed in places that would challenge even a good pub quiz team: Port Vila (Vanuatu), Nuku’alofa (Tonga), Tarawa (Kiribati), Maseru (Lesotho), Mbabane (Swaziland) and Antananarivo (Madagascar)
The cuts have paid for the reopening of embassies in Baghdad, Kabul and North Korea, and the recruitment of specialists in counter-terrorism and drug-trafficking for Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran, the Gulf and elsewhere in the Middle East.
The number of UK-recruited Foreign Office staff, which had dropped from 6 050 in 1995 to 5 635 in 1995, stands again at 6 050. Many of the new staff are for embassy protection: the bill for this has more than doubled, from £2,3-million in 2000-01 to £4,8-million in 2004-05.
There is danger money for those in the most difficult postings, and tenures are normally short-term. The three ambassadors to Baghdad since the invasion each signed on for a year, the period the Foreign Office regards as the maximum anyone should remain under that kind of pressure.
Meanwhile, Pakistan is regarded as so dangerous by the US that its diplomats are banned from taking their families with them. As with Britain, some of the new posts are considered so tough that diplomats are not expected to be in them for more than 12 months, limiting the extent to which they can acquire expertise and contacts, and make any kind of difference. A lot of posts have simply not been filled because they are seen as too dangerous.
Recent reports by the state department inspector general illustrate the daunting problems facing the US effort to wage ”transformational diplomacy”. A dispatch last month on the Riyadh embassy concluded ”the department’s decision to assign staff to one-year, unaccompanied tours of duty imperils good management”. The assessment of the American outpost in Afghanistan in January noted: ”Essentially, the entire American staff turns over each summer, and some officers are inexperienced in the jobs to which they are assigned.”
Britain’s European allies are also on the move. Germany had a huge expansion in diplomatic representation because of re-unification with East Germany, opening 35 new embassies and consulates. Since 9/11, it has created 200 new positions, a third of them in Berlin and the remainder in North Africa, the Middle East and countries such as Indonesia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. ”We got more money from the Bundestag for people to observe the war on terrorism and try to engage with the Islamic world,” a diplomat said.
According to a French diplomat, Paris is reviewing its diplomatic network and announcements are expected over the coming year. Unlike Germany, Paris did not need to expand in the Middle East because, like Britain, historically it has been well represented there. But it has spent millions on security for 60 of its embassies worldwide, and increased the number of staff working exclusively on terrorism, either in Paris or abroad. It is seeking to save costs by sharing embassy buildings with other EU countries, such as Germany.
But the diplomatic shake-up is not just the West shifting eastwards. The East is moving in every direction. From Africa to Latin America and from Pyongyang to Washington, Chinese diplomats have become more busy than at any time in the nation’s history in arranging high-level visits and coordinating business deals to finesse and fuel what President Hu Jintao calls the nation’s ”peaceful rise” to world power status.
Under a policy initiated during the Mao Zedong era, China is one of the few states in the world to maintain an embassy in almost every country with which it has diplomatic relations. The foreign ministry is secretive about the strength and prioritisation of its diplomatic missions, saying only that there are ”about 5 000” government officials posted overseas.
But diplomats privately admit that it is a heavy financial burden to keep 153 embassy-level missions, including those in such tiny states as Nauru (population 8 100), Andorra (population 35 000) and Grenada (population 90 000). This does not include representation to the United Nations and other world bodies.
A rough guide to the importance it places on relations with each country can be gauged by the locations of its 61 consular offices. The biggest number is in the United States, which has five. Despite appalling political relations, economically crucial Japan comes next with four. Britain, Germany, France, Australia, Canada and South Africa have three each.
The flow of government cash also gives a hint about strategic priorities. Pakistan, which is seen as a counterweight to closer US ties with India, has been a beneficiary of Beijing’s largesse with the new £44m port in Gwadar one of the most eye-catching projects receiving funding. Angola is one of a number of African nations to receive a billion dollar-plus credit line, often tied to purchases of Chinese goods.
What the diplomatic merry-go-round shows is that the battle between the major powers for influence in emerging nations is intensifying.
The only sure outcome is that in the capitals around the globe language schools are going to be the winners. – Guardian Unlimited Â